How much weight would the Milky Way weigh if the Milky Way could be weighed?
(CNN)The Milky Way is even weightier than imagined. Using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, astronomers have determined the most accurate measurement of its mass: Our vast galaxy clocks in at 1.5 trillion solar masses.
One solar mass is the mass of our sun, which is 2 times 10 to the 30th power kilograms. It’s not exactly as if the Milky Way, or even stars and planets, can be put on a scale.
“We want to know the mass of the Milky Way more accurately so that we can put it into a cosmological context and compare it to simulations of galaxies in the evolving universe,” Roeland van der Marel, head of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in a statement. “Not knowing the precise mass of the Milky Way presents a problem for a lot of cosmological questions.”
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